TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/020689/02068900.068

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 5KB | 85 lines

TECHNOLOGY, Page 74

Japan's Underground Frontier

Proposed subterranean cities could help ease a space crunch


    Underground. The word brings many unsavory adjectives to mind:
dark, dank, clandestine, illegal. But in Japan the "underground"
is becoming the new frontier and the best hope for solving one of
the country's most intractable problems. With a population nearly
half the size of the U.S.'s squeezed into an area no bigger than
Montana, Japan has virtually no room left in its teeming cities.
Developers have built towering skyscrapers and even artificial
islands in the sea, but the space crunch keeps getting worse. Now
some of Japan's largest construction companies think they have an
answer: huge developments beneath the earth's surface where
millions of people could work, shop and, perhaps eventually, make
their homes. "An underground city is no longer a dream. We expect
it to actually materialize in the early part of the next century,"
says Tetsuya Hanamura, the chief of Taisei Corp.'s proposed
development.

    Taisei calls its project Alice City, after Lewis Carroll's
heroine who went underground by way of a rabbit hole. The company,
which has drawn up elaborate plans, envisions two huge concrete
"infrastructure" cylinders, each 197 ft. tall and with a diameter
of 262 ft., that would be built as much as 500 ft. belowground.
They would house facilities for power generation, air conditioning
and waste processing. Each cylinder would be connected by passages
to a series of spheres, which would accommodate stores, theaters,
sports facilities, offices and hotels. Taisei's initial $4.2
billion design could support 100,000 people.

    Even more ambitious is the Urban Geo Grid proposed by Shimizu
Corp. It would be an immense network of subterranean atriums
connected by tunnels and filled with such facilities as offices,
gymnasiums, libraries, exhibition halls and public baths. The
project would be built 164 ft. below the ground, sprawl across 485
sq. mi. and accommodate 500,000 people. Not only would temperature
and humidity be controlled, say the planners, but real sunlight
would be reflected in through vents from the surface. Estimated
cost: $80.2 billion.

    Neither project has received an official go-ahead, but the
Japanese government has set up task forces in several ministries
to think about underground cities. Says Nobuhiko Sato, a
high-ranking planner at the Construction Ministry: "The time has
come to consider urban planning from the vertical viewpoint.
Underground development has a great and realistic potential for
alleviating congestion."

    Japanese companies say they have the technology to build
extensive subterranean projects without disturbing the people
aboveground. The Tokyo Electric company already has a high-voltage
power station right below a Buddhist temple. Engineers are
confident that they can create enormous underground structures with
little danger of cave-ins. They point to such construction
breakthroughs as the 33.5-mile-long Seikan Tunnel, the world's
longest underwater corridor, which connects Japan's main island of
Honshu with Hokkaido to the north.

    Nonetheless, serious questions remain. Though Japanese cities
already have underground shopping malls and parking garages, their
depth and size have been strictly limited by law. The reason: a
devastating fire in an underground shopping mall in Shizuoka that
killed 15 people in 1980. Subterranean structures are resistant to
earthquakes and water leaks but generally vulnerable to fire and
smoke. Architects believe they can beat the problem with
sophisticated sensor systems to warn of fires and temporary
shelters in which the inside air pressure is kept slightly higher
than normal to repel smoke.

    The biggest obstacle could be the psychological barrier to
living away from the sun and sky. Critics see the potential for
mass claustrophobia. For that reason, planners foresee few
underground housing projects, at least initially. The idea is to
move offices and stores beneath the surface to free up the land
above for residential building. People would become vertical
commuters, going down a huge elevator shaft to work.

    The supporters of underground living believe it can be made
comfortable with spacious, well-lighted enclosures and liberal use
of plants that grow indoors. "Creating an illusion is not so
difficult as one might think," says Shoji Takahashi, chief engineer
for Asahi Television, which built a studio 66 ft. below Tokyo's
fashionable Roppongi district. "When it's raining up there, we use
a special shower to create a rainy night in the underground studio
too."